The Texas School Book Depository stands as a museum 50 years after the assassination of President Kennedy. / Jon Walker / Argus Leader

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The front page of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader on Nov. 22, 1963.

A street corner in downtown Dallas has held a lock on my imagination for 50 years.

The car carrying President John F. Kennedy turned right from Main Street onto Houston Street just before 12:30 p.m.

If he looked up from the back seat, the president saw the Texas School Book Depository a block ahead of him. If he looked closely, he might have seen Lee Oswald with his $12 rifle waiting in the sixth-floor window.

The crime of the century was a simple thing if the simple explanation is true. The limousine went a block on Houston Street and did a hairpin turn onto Elm. The man in the window shot the president, walked to the opposite corner of the sixth floor, left his rifle there and walked downstairs. He bumped into the building superintendent, a policeman and a news reporter, then walked out the door into thin air.

Did the president see him in the window?

I had the chance to stand there and wonder myself last month when my wife, Karen, and I visited Dallas. This wasn’t a trip to clear up a mystery. It was to see what the president saw.

I grew up in the shadow of the memory of Nov. 22, 1963.

I was 9 years old, a fourth-grader playing tetherball at noon recess at Johnson School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A friend, Stewart Holmes, ran up and said Kennedy was shot. In gym class, Mr. Goodwin said he’d heard something about it. In music class, Mrs. Hoffmeier composed herself and said he was dead. What followed still is clear.

Home after school, meet discouraged mother at the door, catch a bus for YMCA swimming lessons, afternoon newspaper says “THE PRESIDENT IS DEAD,” wake up Saturday wondering whether it really happened. On Sunday, it’s a packed house at St. Paul’s Methodist Church. We drive to Waterloo to visit Uncle Paul and hear on the car radio that Jack Ruby shot Oswald. On Monday, it’s horses and drums and the funeral march on black-and-white TV.

A lot gets laid at the foot of the Kennedy assassination — race riots, the moon landing, the Beatles, Medicare and the Miracle Mets. “Coming Apart” is the right title for William L. O’Neill’s superb book on the 1960s.

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Not all of it fits.

“It was a time the country went through a great deal of change in social mores, civil rights, the feminist movement,” said Christina DeVita, 66, associate professor of psychology at Augustana College. “Tons of things changed. I don’t know if the JFK assassination started those changes, but it just seems to me personally ... the country hasn’t been the same since. We’ve never recovered from the Kennedy assassination.”

One thing that does fit is the fixture of a personal timeline. Everything since Kennedy’s death has funneled through that date. It’s a force of gravity, a mental sorting that adds context to every wedding, graduation and childhood camping trip, every bracket in the family tree. It’s not because a violent deed caused the peaceful passage of power in a free society, true as that was. It’s that news gives the mind a frame of reference. If the news is startling enough — a crime in broad daylight, the death of the world’s most famous person, a manhunt, a second murder of officer J.D. Tippit, a weekend of grief and still another murder on live TV at the Dallas police station — it sets off an adrenaline rush still flickering 50 years later. I suspect this is especially so for the young.

DeVita was 16, a high school senior in Brooklyn, N.Y. She and her classmates visited Washington, D.C., that fall and toured the White House. They wept when they heard about JFK. Her school canceled that night’s basketball game. Her brother was to be married the next day. “The wedding went on, but under a different spirit,” she said.

Stan Peterson, a Vermillion resident, was about to attend his uncle John Stone’s funeral that afternoon. He was with other nephews in the upstairs of a house in Sioux City, when a niece ran up the stairs and said, “They shot the president.” The funeral went on an hour later. Ahead for Peterson, then 16, was a career with four years in the Navy, work as an alcohol and drug counselor, then as a house painter and landscaper. He’s thought a lot about the qualities of different presidents. Frozen in mind are the optimism Kennedy offered and the moment all that ended in Dallas.

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“He made us look at the good in us instead of the normal,” Peterson said.

I’ve never known what to make of the personal fixation with Kennedy. I’ve read much about his personal life and his politics. Liberals and conservatives both claim him. He blundered in Cuba in 1961 with the Bay of Pigs and said it was his fault. He succeeded in Cuba in 1962 by backing two nations away from war and was content to win without gloating. I remember almost none of that from real time, but I do remember the voice and the cadence of his speech. It’s easy to see why people liked him.

The drive from Sioux Falls to Dallas is 900 miles.In downtown Dallas, life goes on. A few blocks from Dealey Plaza is a restaurant district with a pedestrian feel that reminds a South Dakota tourist of Phillips Avenue. People are very friendly. Elm Street is a busy roadway for cars leaving downtown. Two X’s in the pavement are startling to see, but by marking the spots where the car was when Kennedy was hit, they answer every visitor’s question. The grassy knoll is to the right, and there too is the Book Depository. A $16 ticket gets a visitor to the sixth floor, for a walk back through the Kennedy years by way of newspapers, photos and newsreel.

We spent four hours on the sixth floor. So absorbing is the display that it’s surprising halfway around to come to the corner window where Oswald is said to have waited and then fired the shots. Cardboard boxes creating a sniper’s nest are stacked in place. If the story is right, this is the counterpoint to the view on the street. This would be what the sniper saw when the limousine turned the corner at Main and Houston.